One of the challenges in dealing with modern portfolios like the Permanent Portfolio, the various IVY portfolios, Risk Parity portfolios, etc is the lack of long term historical data. Most of the modern portfolio data for a broad range of asset classes only goes back to 1973. The period from 1973 onward obviously only represents a subset of historical economic and financial conditions.… Read the rest

In today’s post I want to address another approach to dealing with the prospect of poor future returns. In my last post I described the prospect of poor future returns and different risk-based portfolio strategies in such an environment. Today I’ll consider an alternative. The alternatives are various dedicated income approaches that put the retirement income stream at the top of the priority list.… Read the rest

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about asset valuations, in particular US stocks and US bonds, and their impact of future returns. This is nothing new. It just seems to get louder at the start of every new year. I’ve discussed this topic before on the blog. Last time here.… Read the rest

And there goes January. That was sure quick. There were a few developments over January in a few of the tactical asset allocation portfolios so let’s get right to it. Here is the February 2015 tactical asset allocation update. As of this month all the data is coming from new versions of my Google spreadsheets which are updating correctly.… Read the rest

The world of quantitative finance is never boring. At least not from the research perspective. Today I want to explore some new research from one of the top quant shops on the small company effect and see how an investor can apply it simply to an existing quant approach. Specifically, I want to investigate if adding a quality screen to a small cap quant value portfolio increases performance.… Read the rest

Time for another one of those yearly updates. In this post I’ll update the data for the worst times in history to retire by adding 2014 data to the 4 worst retirement portfolios in history. See here for last year’s update.

The worst time to retire since 1929 turns out not to be the Great Depression, as most people would believe.… Read the rest

This post has nothing to do with asset prices, valuation, or timing the market as the title may have led you to believe. It has to do with investor psychology and behavior. Over the years I’ve wondered if certain types of people would be happier if they didn’t invest in anything but cash.… Read the rest

What else do I have to do on an NFL playoff weekend? Yesterday I decided not to wait any longer for the Google god to bless my GTAA 13 spreadsheet with an upgrade to the newest version. Good thing I found a workaround – create a new sheet from scratch and re-do all the formulas and tables in the new sheet.… Read the rest

I’ve finally managed to update most of the diversified portfolios I track with the 2014 performance data. In my last post I updated the specific equity only quant strategies I track. OK, so let’s get right to it.

For more details on the actual portfolios you can reference this post from last October.… Read the rest